Competitive freediver & instructor Luca Malaguti recently took part in the 2021 Dahab Apnea Competition, scoring a personal best of -72m in CWTB with his Alchemy V330 carbon fins. While in Dahab for a few months, he saw a change in himself. Physical training is easy, you just train your body, get enough food and get enough sleep. But how do you train your mind?
"With fluidity, and minimal resistance we go down to the depths". This was one of the most powerful lessons I had to recently re-learn. It has, basically, forced me to reconsider and re-calibrate my entire relationship with apnea altogether.
Up to now, I could get to the bottom of the line, by pushing and relying on my physical instrument, that is the body I have. Not paying much attention to the mind. The mind would wander, unfocused, no problem. I thought it only as a physical endeavour. The mind wanders into dark and darker recesses of the mind, until an idea, far darker than the very bottom, sticks to you, it does not leave you. If you push the body, without the mind, beyond this point of inner darkness, you will simply hurt yourself.
“I can tell you with experience, physical pain heals faster than psychological pain”. I reached a point, a door if you will, where going back to my usual habits was not an option. Hurting myself was not to be a collateral in freediving. I realized I would either change, or give up the sport altogether, and go back to the mountains. This was an approach doomed to begin with - nature pushes back and she pushes hard.
A sports-car requires over 60% of its horsepower to accelerate the final 100 km/hr to reach maximum velocity. Why? The more you push against nature, the more nature pushes back. The solution? Along came a little nomadic town in the middle of the desert: Dahab. Not quite Africa, not quite Asia, geologically on one, geographically on the other. With this little town, came a great blue sink hole, carved over millions of years of erosive forces. I think this place, at the very least, has started to teach me not to resist, not to push - to flow and seek minimal resistance.
Enter a “flow-state” where the mind, first and foremost, is in complete ecstasy of the present moment. In other words, the free-fall, is nothing but a mental journey. When you’re in tune with your surroundings, everything becomes clear: the flow of water over your face, the sound of the carabiner rubbing against the line, the pressure hugging you more and more. Use it, it’s all you have. You scan the body, you identify tension, or areas of tension, you accept it, it’s part of you, it belongs to you, but you’re only an observer aboard this vessel, thus it does not control or define you. That tension you can release, let it go and reset the mind.
